Sugar Digest 2013-03-19

Sugar Digest

1. We need to finalize our application to Google Summer of Code by the end of next week. I’ve put a rough draft of our application in the wiki (See Summer_of_Code/2013/Application). Most important is to finalize our list of project ideas and mentors. Please add your ideas to the wiki to Summer_of_Code/2013.

2. I’ve been on the road (and ice) these past few weeks. I gave the keynote at GoOpen Arctic, and had a chance to hobnob with the likes of Richard Stallman and Håkon Wium Lie. It was quite the adventure since the conference was held in two venues: Tromsø and Longyearbyrn (the latter being in Svalbard at 78:15 North). Lots of enthusiasm for Sugar and interest in connected the young end of our developer community with kids in Norway. I came back to Boston and almost immediately headed to West Coast to attend Pycon. I was the keynote for a new Education Summit at Pycon, organized by Naomi Ceder. I had a chance to catch up with a number of old friends, including Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés, Mel Chua, Stephen Jacobs and Jeff Elkner and the RIT Sugar team. As usual, I gave my talk using Turtle Art, and afterwards, we discussed the gulf between block-based graphical programming environments and text-based environments such as Python. One idea that emerged was to add an export-Python option to Turtle Art (similar to the export-Logo option that already is part of the package). Raúl and I started writing some code that looks promising. Stay tuned. Then off to Washington DC with Claudia Urrea for a meeting with the Inter-American Development Bank to discuss the use of Sugar in Honduras. We kicked around a lot of good ideas about mentoring and building bridges between teachers.

3. Martin Abente (with a little help from his friends) has gotten the beginnings of a Twitter Web Service working from the Sugar Journal. Simply invoke the Copy-To Twitter menu item, and your Journal entry is sent as a tweet. There is some work to be done in registering the service per user and some housekeeping regarding pulling replies into the comments field of the Journal, but it is already in pretty decent shape, thanks to the Web Services framework that Raúl and I developed last month. (I am hoping that the framework is reviewed and accepted into Sugar so that it will be easier for people to test and enhance it.)

In the community

4. Guzmán Trinidad has written a book about Physics on the XO (See Física con XO). It features many of the projects that Guzmán and Tony Forster have been developing, using a combination of Measure and Turtle Blocks.